* Posts by philbo

255 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2007

Page:

Build a bonkers hi-fi

philbo

Re: Pesky no-sense-humour chekur

With any luck the comment will do what my poorly-configured SQL server does... sync without trace

Lego ponders Portal pack

philbo
Thumb Up

Re: A lego mindstorms GLaDOS?

At least that means you'd be able to smash the ****er to bits when her annoying voice and sarcastic comments push you over the edge.

Sleek new Macs violate fanbois' Retinas with display garbage

philbo
Trollface

What's the big deal?

I've been able to get my Windows box to do this sort of thing for years. At last, Apple's finally catching up :)

UK snoop system had 1,000 COCKUPS - including 2 duff cuffs

philbo
Unhappy

Re: Hate to say this

The error rate is pretty much what you'd expect it to be - it's futile to expect perfection when there's people writing down requests.

Whether the error rate is reasonable/acceptable does rather depend on what gets done with those intercepts which weren't erroneous - if they'd led to 400k convictions, then the odd misplaced arrest would be acceptable. As it is, it looks like the whole snooping system is fantastically overused by petty officialdom so that huge number of snooping requests will inevitably lead to a significant number of errors.

What I means is.. if the number of requests is high due to guidelines being ignored and not rigorously applied, this is not an acceptable error rate. If the only requests that went through were for criminal cases where the information was really needed, then the error rate would probably be acceptable (as actual numbers of errors would be very low indeed).

Tablets, copycats and Weird Al Yankovic

philbo

Re: <raises hand>

>A lot of Bob Rivers songs tend to be attributed to Weird Al.

I'd be a bit pissed off if I were Bob Rivers, because the ones attributed to Weird Al are the best of his songs.. he's done a humungous number of really rather poor to mediocre parodies, but a few that are outstanding tending towards genius. And it's a bit like some people have gone "that's way too good to be Bob Rivers, must be Weird Al instead" :-)

philbo

Re: <raises hand>

>Amish Paradise and Dirty Deeds spring to mind

Dirty Deeds (Done With Sheep) is Bob Rivers, not Weird Al (and is far and away the best thing Bob Rivers has done - most times he doesn't even finish the song).

I know the words to Saga Begins, Amish Paradise and many more far better than the original songs. But then, I'm a somewhat excessive writer of parodies myself..

O2 outage outrage blamed on new Ericsson database

philbo
Joke

Re: Huawei?

It's what gets chanted at the start of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", isn't it?

Religious wars brewing in ICANN gTLD expansion

philbo
Devil

Re: This is the internet...

Some religion gTLDs -

.almighty

.church (although you might get catholic.church, methodist.church what happens if someone registers charlotte.church?)

.brainwashingchildren

..it's obvious why religions don't like the thought of pornography - their monopoly on perverting the minds of the young is being invaded.

O2, GiffGaff network goes titsup for unlucky punters

philbo
Happy

Re: Contract fine

Upvoted, because a witty, self-deprecatory reaction to being corrected is far better than the sort of knee-jerk pettiness that often happens round here.

philbo

Re: Contract fine, PAYG broken

Problem with extrapolations from n=1 data is that they aren't usually correct (though you may find you can get a job at the Daily Mail based on this kind of analysis). In this household, we have five giffgaff PAYG phones, only one of which went offline (and one had no charge, so might have done, who knows).

I like giffgaff, even though they do make me top up £5 every three months to keep the calls to the other family mobiles free.

NASA was WRONG on arsenic-gobbling aliens, claim boffins

philbo
Facepalm

Re: Media

>The media should stop reading scientific journals

..especially those scientifically-illterate journalists with their media studies degrees who seem to be able to read an abstract and get (intentionally?) entirely the wrong end of the stick every single time. Still, they can always get employment at the Telegraph, it seems.

Now Apple faces Siri court room showdown

philbo
Happy

Re: I'm sorry...

Upvote for the BBT wefewence :-)

philbo

Re: Of course Apple started all this

I thought you were going to be linking to this picture:

http://d.asset.soup.io/asset/2503/2525_1e70.jpeg

Facebook: Our phone app DID seize your email

philbo
Joke

>Bug my arse

I'd rather not.

philbo
Joke

Re: yeah yeah, it was a bug...

>Better still. Turn off Facebook period!

"Facebook period"? Is that part of the timeline?

Microsoft: Don't overclock Windows 8 unless you like our new BSOD

philbo
FAIL

Maths fail?

>The probability that a machine with five days TACT would crash was one in 330 compared to one in 190 for a PC with an uptime of 30 days.

..and a few lines later..

>Microsoft found CPU subsystems of brand name PCs was one in 120 versus one in 93 for white boxes machines when tested for 30 days of continues running.

So if the probability for brand name PCs was 1:120, white boxes were 1:93 there must be some fantastically reliable neither-brand-name-nor-white-box PCs to get the overall figure up to 1:190

..or am I missing something?

Microsoft's offices gutted in Athens arson attack

philbo

Re: But...but...but...

>Why are you declining Latin, when this is a Greek tragedy?

>(Insert line from Mark Twain about declensions here...)

"It's obvious, really: the Greeks would never suggest bewaring of themselves, if one can use such a participle (bewaring that is). And it's clearly Latin, not because timeo ends in "-o", because the Greek first person also ends in "-o" – although actually there is a Greek word timao, meaning 'I honour'. But the "-os" ending is a nominative singular termination of a second declension in Greek, and an accusative plural in Latin, of course, though actually Danaos is not only the Greek for 'Greek'; it's also the Latin for 'Greek'. It's very interesting, really."

..Ok, not a Mark Twain line, but a Bernard Woolley one. And not really an answer to the question, but any excuse..

philbo
FAIL

Timeo danaos

et inflammare edificium

..the "fail" is for my Latin declension

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

philbo
WTF?

Re: Lewis Page Anagrams

or..

Agile spew

Please wig

Nigerian scams are hyper-efficient idiot finders

philbo

Shameless plug alert

I even wrote a song about it:

Nigerian Spam

..to the tune of "American Pie".

Vatican subtly shifts its position on The Blues Brothers

philbo
Devil

Re: How do they rate..

>The Pope Must Die ?

>A totally corrupt and very scheming Vatican in league with mobsters and arms dealers looking to put a feeble idiot into the role of pope - and the film is pretty much the same, except with the surreal idea of a decent man getting the job by accident.

Possibly my favourite el Reg comment, ever :-)

Quoted for absolute truth.

Apple desperate to prevent nightmare scenario of iPad in Iranian hands

philbo

@AC

>you are always going to get perhaps overzealous employees sticking to the letter of the law / policies a bit too enthusiastically.

Well, you know what they say about one bad Apple...

ARM unleashes 8-core Mali 450 GPU, heads down both forks in road

philbo
Thumb Up

Re: Pedantry alert

"Wreck a nice beach"

:-)

You gotta love that beach wreck ignition software.

Top US Senator to Apple, Google: 'Curb your spy planes'

philbo
Joke

Google?

=go ogle?

Google blocks MP3 rippers from YouTube

philbo
Unhappy

Re: Business model

>Videos containing copyrighted content are automatically detected, and copyright holders get a share of advertising.

Which has given rise to a knock-on "business model": claiming copyright for something and hoping that whoever posted the video doesn't realize it's erroneous.

Goo^G^G^G Have a look for "Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society" - they tried to claim copyright to a parody of Land of Hope and Glory I posted on Youtube, but retracted as soon as I challenged. However, a lot of (it appears nearly all) people don't challenge and assume they're right, so any money from advertising goes to a bunch of parasites who do nothing other than add annoying ads to videos. Some people *even after being told of this" did not challenge, and so have ads on their videos paying money to someone with no right to it at all.

I did write to YouTube asking for these fraudsters to be banned if it turns out as I suspect that they're repeatedly claiming to hold copyright for things they do not - so far, five weeks and no response. It doesn't seem high on their list of priorities :-(

Earthquakes will release captured carbon: Stanford study

philbo
Joke

Re: Just shove it in deeper...

"Just shove it in deeper"???

How many times have I heard that in answer to things not going as well as they might?

Kogan 'taxes' IE7 users

philbo
Unhappy

Re: This has nothing to do with IE

>Lots of free advertising. Very clever.

Yep, really rather brilliant.

..the bastards. Why didn't I think of that?

Got no idea what Hadoop is, but think you need it? You're not alone

philbo

Re: So..?

It's a way of doing stuff somewhere, acting on data stored wherever, sending the results anywhere; because of the level at which it's tiered, it's not so much "cloud" as "fog"

(Does that make sense? If so, anyone got any hadoop jobs going?)

Firm applies for .sucks domain

philbo

Re: This is just too stupid even for me

>It's not big and it aint clever. FFS - .sucks?

Start up your own .ffs TLD? I like the sound of that, but I'm sure wtf.ffs would go pretty quickly

I thought the porn chaps missed a trick when they went for .xxx - ISTM that .cum would work better.

philbo

>But what about <insert porn star name>.sucks ?

<insert porn star name>.sucks/atennisballthroughahose

..I can see the TLD being popular with vacuum cleaner manufacturers, though

Number 10 shuts wallet on closed-source IT projects

philbo

Re: Great,but

>> The problem with government IT is that they start large.

>Yes, it's government. It works on a national scale. That's what government does.

Most of the time the problem is that it doesn't work, at any scale. And just because the same job is being done all across the country does not mean that a single system is required for everyone doing that job.

There has been in government IT projects over the last decade and more an assumption that monolithic solutions are the only ones that a government should be trying, and eyewateringly humungous amounts of money have been wasted trying to replace working multiple local systems with single national ones (usually written by EDS). I hope the new approach they're showing now is more than a nod to "open source" as a freebie buzzword, but also rethinking how government IT development ought to be done.

MPs brand BlackBerrys for bobbies scheme a failure

philbo
Facepalm

Why do they not trial these sorts of things first?

I'd have thought this was perfectly suited to have a trial - say half-a-dozen forces of different sizes and locations being issued with Blackberries and seeing how much time/paper it saves.

Why do politicians always assume they're going to be right about "money-saving" ideas, when so very frequently these schemes seem to cost far more than they save? Why is testing an idea before rolling it out considered so infrequently?

HP boffins create net-zero energy data center

philbo
Joke

Don't you think it's kind of ironic to run a cloud server farm on photovoltaics?

Facebook smacks away hardness, sticks MySQL stash on flash

philbo

Shudder

He says: "By leveraging Fusion-io cards.."

"leveraging"???

Doesn't he just mean "using", but wants it to sound like he's down wit da yoof in management bullshit?

And the worst film NEVER made is...

philbo

I think I've got one of the songs from that...

Oh, Luke, do not be mad

When I tell you I'm your Dad

Honest, it's a blessing, not a curse

Though I missed the whole palaver

Of being there as father

Gotta say things could be so much worse, so

Come on, Luke, join the Dark Side of the Force

,.didn't want to post the whole lot, you can read the rest here:

http://www.amiright.com/parody/70s/ericidle0.shtml

Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

philbo
Devil

Re: Problem scenario

All you need is a fairly cryptic voice activation control.. something you wouldn't say by accident, like:

"I call upon the power of the dark side! Sidious, give me power! Vader, give me control! Death star, vapourize the rebel planet.. er.. flash drive"

..or in a more Harry Potter sort of world:

"Flash discus incinero"

It would be almost worth it to see the cop's reaction

Call of Duty hacker behind bars after college burglary

philbo

Re: Not exactly Professor Moriarty

How would one tell from this article? A half-decent criminal mastermind wouldn't be caught (especially the way this chap was picked up - not through any tracing of his on-line activities at all).

Come to think of it, a half-decent criminal mastermind would probably be heading up the police department which investigates cyber-crime.. he'd find it dead easy to land that job, ISTM.

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

philbo

Re: File managers?

> Heh. I actually paid for WIndows Commander before the rename.

Me, too :-) And the latest version still works with the (14-year-old) wincmd.key

The UI is skinnable, but after playing with a few different looks, I've gone back to what I'm used to: I don't use TC for what it looks like, but for the incredible power of what you can do with it.

philbo

Re: File managers?

Thank you.. I was getting worried that I was the only Total Commander convert on el Reg (which would surprise me, TBH). First thing that goes onto any PC I use (I've asked ninite if they'd be so kind as to include it, but no joy so far).

philbo

Re: correction

IrfanView lets you add plug-ins for different file types, though - you might have had one of those installed?

I use IrfanView as the image file viewer integrated into Total Commander (shareware, but completely uncrippled if unregistered.. and my licence file from when I registered my copy in 1998 still works).

US Judge says IP addresses don't identify pirates

philbo

Re: But with an IP address..

That was a brilliant Brass Eye - "internet paedophiles can make computer keyboards emit noxious fumes to subdue children".. unfortunately took the piss out of so many different people's paedophilia scaremongering that there wasn't anyone in the media left to say nice things about it.

I'd not be surprised if Ben Dover was using the same sorts of tactics: he's known as a bit of a big knob in the industry

philbo
Facepalm

But with an IP address..

..you can bring up a photograph of the user. I saw that in Jumpin' Jack Flash years ago, so it must be true.

..or take over the PC webcam and look at who the offender is in real-time. I've seen that in *loads* of films now - any amateur hacker, geek or FBI agent can do it.

Samsung shows 'designed for humans' handset

philbo

Re: @madra / Does anyone proof-read any more?

It's compulsory when complaining about a lack of proof-reading in an article to include at least one typo - and a typo is surely what it is: the sentence reads perfectly well without the semicolon, so it's more reasonable to assume that it's typographical rather than a hypocritical "lack of grammar skill".

..and shame on El Reg for its misuse of "your" - it is rather poor.

Microsoft kills Windows Live brand

philbo

Re: At least..........

>95

>

>98 MAJOR bug-fix for Windows 95

I'd have said 95b was the major bug-fix version, but it was also all those things MS said 95 was going to be but wasn't (actually an operating system rather than a DOS device driver, for example; 32-bit file system, that sort of thing). I don't know how many thousand users I had running completely stable for over a decade on 95b PCs - I don't know because they never called for support.

philbo

Re: Microsoft Kills Windows Live

@Kaiser Soze

..damn you, I was going to say that..

But seeing as you're there.. who is Kaiser Soze?

BSkyB boss: 'I don't work for Rupert Murdoch, remember'

philbo

How much???

ARPU - average revenue per user - of £546, 10 million subscribers.. so nearly £5½billion income in the UK alone. Wow.

,,makes you think, doesn't it.. what wonderful value the Beeb is in comparison :-)

Britain prepares for government by iPad

philbo

Re: Jailbreaking

"tech-savvy MP"?

Isn't that an oxymoron?

Boy wrecks £22k worth of MacBooks by weeing on them

philbo
Joke

Who'd have thought..

..a Mac would need a raincoat.

Ten... eight-bit classic games

philbo
Happy

Re: Getting in on the titles-you-didn't-pick wagon...

Frak!, Zalaga and Firetrack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxdd2_qrpg)

(CoI warning: written by a cousin of mine)

Telegraph website falls over in outage riddle

philbo

Did anyone else

..read that as "outrage"?

As I was surfing here and there

I hit a page that wasn't there

It wasn't there again, I read

An "Error 404" instead

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